nervously.
“No thanks.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Maybe not. I do know that I quite like having a body, being able to walk around and breathe.”
“But you know nothing of abstraction. If you had any experience of it before you became a prefect, it must be just a fading memory by now. Like a glimpse of the gates of heaven between a crack in the clouds. Before the clouds closed again.”
“I’ve sampled abstraction—I had implants before I joined Panoply.”
“You’ve sampled it, yes. But only in Sea-Tac would you know the euphoric bliss of total immersion.” Thalia looked across the open space, at the boxes ranked on the far wall, the endless parade of human busts.
“They’re all somewhere else, aren’t they? Mentally, I mean. Their minds aren’t in Sea-Tac at all.”
“What would be the point? My people are the only real citizens of the Glitter Band, the only ones who truly inhabit it. Their minds are out there now, Thalia: spread across the entire volume of near-Yellowstone space, a choir invisible, singing the body electric, angels in the architecture.”
“They’ve paid a price for it.”
“One they’d all gladly pay ten times over.”
“I really should be getting on with the upgrade,” Thalia said.
“The polling core’s at the bottom of the shaft. Follow the walkway and it’ll bring you to the base in two rotations.” Thalia did as Citizen Newkirk instructed. When she reached the bottom of the shaft—Newkirk lowering down to match her descent until he was hovering only a metre above the floor—she reached out her right hand and summoned the whiphound back. It sprang into her grip, retracting its filament with a supersonic crack. She locked the whiphound back onto her belt.
“I’ll run through what I need to do. I’m going to open a ten-minute access window into the polling core’s internal operating architecture.” Thalia patted the cylinder she had brought with her.
“Then I’m going to implement a minor software upgrade. I won’t need to take abstraction down for more than a few milliseconds.” She cast a glance at the wall of busts.
“They won’t notice it, will they?”
“A few milliseconds? Not very likely. Buffering software in their implants will smooth over any glitches, in any case.”
“Then there’s no reason for me not to begin.” Thalia’s cylinder opened like a puzzle box, revealing racks of specialised tools and colour-coded data diskettes. She pulled out the first of the four one-time pads and held the rectangle up to eye level. She applied finger pressure and watched text spill across the rectangle’s surface.
“This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Probity Three Saxifrage.”
“Override confirmed,” the apparatus replied.
“You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”
“Present entry port sixteen.” The polling core sank into the floor like a descending periscope, rotating on its axis as it did so. An illuminated slot came into view. Thalia reached into her cylinder and extracted the diskette containing the relevant software upgrade. She slid the diskette into the slot, feeling the reassuring tug as the pillar accepted it. The diskette vanished into the polling core, accompanied by a series of faint rumbles and thuds.
“The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment, Deputy Field Prefect Ng?”
“Use the fragment to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six.” She turned to Newkirk and whispered, “This will only take an instant. It’s a run-time fragment, so there won’t be any need to recompile the main operating stack.”
“I cannot overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six,” the core said. Thalia felt a tingle of sweat on her brow.
“Clarify.”
“The requested operation would introduce a tertiary-stage conflict in the virtual memory array addressing the executable image in segment kappa epsilon nine nine four.”
“A problem, Prefect?” Newkirk asked mildly. Thalia wiped her brow dry.
“Nothing we can’t work around. The architecture’s just a bit knottier than I expected. I might have to take abstraction down for slightly longer than a few milliseconds.”
“What counts as ’slightly longer’?”
“Maybe a tenth of a second.”
“That won’t go unnoticed.”
“You now have four hundred and eighty seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”
“Thank you,” she said, struggling not to sound flustered.
“Please evaluate the following. Suspend run-time execution of all images between segments alpha alpha to kappa epsilon inclusive, then perform the data segment overwrite I already requested. Confirm that this would not involve a suspension of abstraction access exceeding one hundred milliseconds—”
“The aforementioned tertiary-stage conflict would now be resolved, but a quaternary-stage conflict would then arise.”
Thalia swore under her breath. Why had she not probed the architecture before initiating the one-time access window? She could have learned everything she needed to without invoking Panoply privileges.
“Turn it around,” she said, suddenly seeing a way.
“Tell me what would be required to perform a clean installation of the new data segment.”
“The new data segment can be installed, but it will entail a complete rebuild of all run-time images in all segments between alpha alpha and kappa epsilon inclusive.”
“Status of abstraction during downtime?”
“Abstraction will be fully suspended during the rebuild.”
“Estimated build-time?” Thalia asked, her throat dry.
“Three hundred and forty seconds, plus or minus ten seconds, for a confidence interval of ninety-five per cent.”
“State remaining time on access window.”
“You now have four hundred and six seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.” She looked at Newkirk, who was studying her with a distinctly unamused expression, in so far as his wax-like mask was capable of expression.
“You heard what the machine said,” Thalia told him.
“You’re going to lose abstraction for more than five minutes. I have to begin the build in the next minute to stand a chance of it finishing before my window closes.”
“If it doesn’t build in time?”
“The core will default to safe mode. It’ll need more than a six-hundred-second pad to unlock it then. You could be down for days, with the way Panoply’s tied up at the moment.”
“Losing abstraction for five minutes will cost us dearly.”
“I wish there was some other way. But I really need to start that build.”
“Then do whatever you must.”
“Do you wish to warn the citizens?” Thalia asked.
“It wouldn’t help them. Or me, for that matter.” His voice turned stern.
“Begin, Prefect. Get this over with.”
Thalia nodded and told the polling core to commence the build.
“Abstraction will be interrupted in ten seconds,” the pillar informed her.
“Predicted resumption in three hundred and forty seconds.”
“Time on window.”
“Access window will close in three hundred and forty-four seconds.”
“You like to cut it fine,” Newkirk said.
Thalia made to respond, but even as she was opening her mouth she saw that there would be no point. The man’s face had frozen into mask-like stiffness, his eyes no longer quivering in their sockets. He looked dead; or rather he had become the dead stone bust he had always resembled. They would all be like that, Thalia realised. All one million, two hundred and seventy four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people inside Carousel New Seattle-
